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Web Page Templates - III
Robots Meta Tag Archive Attribute
Almost immediately upon finishing the last article on web page templates having dynamic content, I ran across a reference showing the robots meta tag with the attributes: "index,follow,archive". I immediately jumped to the conclusion that the absence of the "archive" was the cause of the rapid disappearance of my articles from the Google indexes on the shutdown of the OpenSourceToday site. Moreover, I suspected it might have played a role in the vanishing of my links in the web archive. Hence, I intended to add this archive attribute to all content on this site and write a short summary quickly.
I was effectively distracted by a potential client, who made extreme demands, while showing great reluctance to pay for those services in a commensurate scale. Perhaps I was lucky by limiting my losses with respect to the latter and not having the need to post a retraction regarding the former. However, my interest here is focused on coding not business dealings, so let that part pass. Regarding the other, I have been unable to find any documentation showing the archive attribute exists or even if it is functional other than the negative sense. That is, if you wish to block a page being cached you use either the noarchive or nostore. Very oddly, it seems from the various documentation attempts "index,follow" suffice to have the pages cached. Moreover, while there is or was a symmetric store and nostore pair I could find none for the archive case.
Quick, Futile Addition of the Archive Attribute
I did, however, add the archive link to the home page, menu pages and a few recently written article pages. With each group the change became progressively more difficult. The home page is a single template, that only required one head(er) line change. The main menu pages were comprised of six or seven separate pages, hence, all I had to do was manually make the same change on each menu page individually. However, the articles were numerous static pages that would have to be changed individually. At this point I became determined to push the use of a few common class templates onto which appropriate content is loaded dynamically.
Dynamic Page Templates and Archive Attribute Reversal
I already have two portions of this site that are inherently dynamically driven. Each runs off of its own single web page template and loads proper content to match its identity. The first was newly created in the form of a navigation bar linked to statements and description about the site. The second was the aforementioned set of menus that linked to various content categories. Again with only a single template for each class, the archive attribute was easily removed. Unfortunately, wherever it was placed in articles it will neither be easily found nor easily remedied unless and until I move to a common template with dynamic loading of the article content.
Dynamic Web Site Goal
Despite the probable error, the salubrious effect is that I am determined to have all pages dynamically generated off of a small set of templates. I am almost done with the easy parts, the home page, the site navigator and the main menu all coded and working. Nonetheless, there should be an asterisk after the word "working" for the latter two listed, because the code in both the site navigation and the main menu still has differing unresolved faults. The former does not run data validation and the latter does not have a working error code when a flaw is caught. Both work off of parameters passed by the global GET attached to the respective links. That parameter value allows each menu type to call the proper set of external text files to display its unique content. It will be much more difficult to implement a similar routine for the collection of articles, due to the near necessity of employing a database for data storage and quick retrieval.
Status and Plans
While you might suspect these two dynamic content articles will follow in short order, I have not even begun to write them. Instead I am trying to clear a back log of older, researched topics dating from before the closing of the OpenSourceToday site. One is already in progress, indeed, it was started prior to beginning this note.
This will be the last item listed under the Templates menu. The aforementioned items already in operation will be listed under Dynamic Content. Others, such as forms will where user interactive is the focus will fall either under the Tags and the Dynamic Content menus. There will be further discussions of templates, however, they will not be the central component per se, instead they will just be part of an overall topic. Eventually, my hope is to rationalize the multiple menus into a minimal set.
Both sets of dynamic content pages contain variable head(er) content was linked by a parameter value that selected the proper page content files to load. Thus, having a single template for each class the archive attribute was easily removed from both. In the case of articles, each header describes the content uniquely. Hence, it is a more difficult task, just due to the vastly greater number of articles.
Corrections, suggested extension or comments write: How-To-Guy. If the mailto does not work, use this: hcohen[-At-]bst-softwaredevs.com.
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